Introduction
The twenty-first century saw substantial advances in understanding the biological, psychological, and sociological aspects of adolescent development. Moreover, accumulating data support the notion that adolescent behavior cannot be reduced to purely psychological or biological phenomena. Rather, an understanding of any aspect of adolescence is best derived from an appreciation of biology and psychology and their respective interfaces. For example, neuroimaging studies of adolescents confirm aspects of fluidity in decision making and a number of other cognitive capacities (Giedd 1999) and, during adolescence, the area of the brain responsible for organization, planning, and strategizing is not fully developed, as gray matter continues to thicken (Fig. 1a). In turn, these neuroanatomic changes likely occur in tandem with changes in the psychodynamic processes.
A Proposed course of neuroanatomic development as it relates to classical and...
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Delgado, S.V., Strawn, J.R., Jain, V. (2011). Psychodynamic Understandings. In: Levesque, R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_8
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